David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

considered building a massive network of underground bomb shelters across London, but they abandoned the plan out of a fear that ...

London, dropping tens of thousands of high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices. Forty thousand people wer ...

evacuated to the countryside as the bombing started. But people who needed to stay in the city by and large stayed. As the Blitz ...

shop. The siren blew its warning and I looked to see what would happen. A nun seized the hand of a child she was escorting and h ...

flying in every direction. The incendiaries left a different neighborhood in flames every night. More than a million people lost ...

of their office towers had been reduced to rubble not just once but every night for two and a half months? The typical explanati ...

end of the war that the puzzle was solved by the Canadian psychiatrist J. T. MacCurdy, in a book called The Structure of Morale. ...

misses: They feel the blast, they see the destruction, are horrified by the carnage, perhaps they are wounded, but they survive ...

sirens, watch the enemy bombers overhead, and hear the thunder of the exploding bombs. But the bomb hits down the street or the ...

When the first siren sounded I took my children to our dug-out in the garden and I was quite certain we were all going to be kil ...

over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. “I’ve been bombed!... I’ve been bombed—me!” It ...

being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it. “We are all of us not merely liable to fear,” MacCurdy went ...

courage. In the midst of the Blitz, a middle-aged laborer in a button-factory was asked if he wanted to be evacuated to the coun ...

3. The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative. Being a poor reader is a real obstacle, unl ...

that a traumatic experience like being bombed would have the same effect on everyone: that the only difference between near miss ...

the kinds of fears that can make life during wartime unendurable. Dyslexia is a classic example of this same phenomenon. Many pe ...

little luck and enough other resources that he was able to weather the worst effects of the blast and emerge stronger. Too often ...

4. When Jay Freireich was nine years old, he contracted tonsillitis. He was very sick. The local physician—Dr. Rosenbloom—came t ...

took a shine to him and told him he should go to college. “I said, ‘What do I need?’ He said, ‘Well, probably if you get twenty- ...

Freireich took the train from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois was located. He rented a bedroom in ...